Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 | Page 6

Dutton did not partake of the general hilarity. There was a sneer upon his lip during the whole time, which, however, found no expression in words.
'How quiet you are, James Dutton!' cried a loud voice from out the dense smoke-cloud that by this time completely enveloped us. On looking towards the spot from whence the ringing tones came, a jolly, round face--like the sun as seen through a London fog--gleamed redly dull from out the thick and choking atmosphere.
'Everybody,' rejoined Dutton, 'hasn't had the luck to sell two hundred quarters of wheat at to-day's price, as you have, Tom Southall.'
'That's true, my boy,' returned Master Southall, sending, in the plenitude of his satisfaction, a jet of smoke towards us with astonishing force. 'And, I say, Jem, I'll tell ee what I'll do; I'll clap on ten guineas more upon what I offered for the brown mare.'
'Done! She's yours, Tom, then, for ninety guineas!'
'Gie's your hand upon it!' cried Tom Southall, jumping up from his chair, and stretching a fist as big as a leg of mutton--well, say lamb--over the table. 'And here--here,' he added, with an exultant chuckle, as he extricated a swollen canvas-bag from his pocket--'here's the dibs at once.'
This transaction excited a great deal of surprise at our part of the table; and Dutton was rigorously cross-questioned as to his reason for parting with his favourite hunting mare.
'The truth is, friends,' said Dutton at last, 'I mean to give up farming, and'----
'Gie up farmin'!' broke in half-a-dozen voices. 'Lord!'
'Yes; I don't like it. I shall buy a commission in the army. There'll be a chance against Boney, now; and it's a life I'm fit for.'
The farmers looked completely agape at this announcement; but making nothing of it, after silently staring at Dutton and each other, with their pipes in their hands and not in their mouths, till they had gone out, stretched their heads simultaneously across the table towards the candles, relit their pipes, and smoked on as before.
'Then, perhaps, Mr Dutton,' said a young man in a smartly-cut velveteen coat with mother-of-pearl buttons, who had hastily left his seat further down the table--'perhaps you will sell the double Manton, and Fanny and Slut?'
'Yes; at a price.'
Prices were named; I forget now the exact sums, but enormous prices, I thought, for the gun and the dogs, Fanny and Slut. The bargain was eagerly concluded, and the money paid at once. Possibly the buyer had a vague notion, that a portion of the vender's skill might come to him with his purchases.
'You be in 'arnest, then, in this fool's business, James Dutton,' observed a farmer gravely. 'I be sorry for thee; but as I s'pose the lease of Ash Farm will be parted with; why---- John, waiter, tell Master Hurst at the top of the table yonder, to come this way.'
Master Hurst, a well-to-do, highly respectable-looking, and rather elderly man, came in obedience to the summons, and after a few words in an under-tone with the friend that had sent for him, said: 'Is this true, James Dutton?'
'It is true that the lease and stock of Ash Farm are to be sold--at a price. You, I believe, are in want of such a concern for the young couple, just married.'
'Well, I don't say I might not be a customer, if the price were reasonable.'
'Let us step into a private room, then,' said Dutton rising. 'This is not a place for business of that kind. Sharp,' he added, sotto voce, 'come with us; I may want you.'
I had listened to all this with a kind of stupid wonderment, and I now, mechanically as it were, got up and accompanied the party to another room.
The matter was soon settled. Five hundred pounds for the lease--ten years unexpired--of Ash Farm, about eleven hundred acres, and the stock, implements; the ploughing, sowing, &c. already performed, to be paid for at a valuation based on present prices. I drew out the agreement in form, it was signed in duplicate, a large sum was paid down as deposit, and Mr Hurst with his friend withdrew.
'Well,' I said, taking a glass of port from a bottle Dutton had just ordered in--'here's fortune in your new career; but as I am a living man, I can't understand what you can be thinking about.'
'You haven't read the newspapers?'
'O yes, I have! Victory! Glory! March to Paris! and all that sort of thing. Very fine, I daresay; but rubbish, moonshine, I call it, if purchased by the abandonment of the useful, comfortable, joyous life of a prosperous yeoman.'
'Is that all you have seen in the papers?'
'Not much else. What, besides, have you found in them?'
'Wheat, at ten or eleven pounds a load--less perhaps--other produce in proportion.'
'Ha!'
'I see further, Sharp, than you bookmen do, in some matters. Boney's done for;